The nightly close is the real month-end
Every service ends with a complete financial record: sales by category, tender totals, tips, voids, comps and the HST collected on all of it. We post that close daily, whether it comes from TouchBistro, Lightspeed or Square, so the ledger agrees with the POS every morning instead of being rebuilt from summaries five weeks later. Dine-in food, bar, takeout and delivery each get their own revenue line, because a blended sales number hides exactly the margins a restaurant lives on.
Daily posting is also the fastest error detector a restaurant can own. A deposit that fails to match last night's tender report is a conversation on Tuesday morning, not a mystery in month five. That rhythm is the core of our End-to-End Accounting engagement: bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing under one roof, run on the schedule the business actually operates on.
Delivery platforms: book the sale, not the deposit
Uber Eats, DoorDash and SkipTheDishes deposits arrive net, with commissions, marketing fees, tablet charges and order adjustments already removed, often batched across several days. Recording that deposit as revenue quietly understates sales and distorts everything downstream, starting with the food cost percentage, which is now being measured against revenue that is missing the platform's cut.
We record delivery orders at full menu price, with commissions and fees as their own expense line per platform, then reconcile each platform statement to the bank. Two things fall out of that discipline. You finally see what a delivery order earns after the platform is paid, channel by channel. And the HST stays right: the platforms generally collect tax on your food and pass it through in the payout, but remitting it to the CRA is still your job, and a net-deposit ledger gets that number wrong every period.
A food cost percentage you can act on
Food cost is opening inventory plus purchases minus closing inventory, divided by food sales, and it is only as honest as the counts on either side. We run supplier invoices through Dext as they arrive, coded to match how the kitchen buys: proteins, produce, dry goods, bar. Regular counts, weekly for the volatile categories, turn the number from a quarterly surprise into a weekly control, and invoice-level coding catches supplier price creep the week it starts rather than the quarter it compounds.
The versions worth comparing are theoretical and actual. Costed recipes against the POS product mix say what food cost should have been; the invoices and counts say what it was. The gap is waste, portioning drift, unlogged staff meals or shrink, and once it is visible it has an owner.
Where each POS number belongs
| From the nightly close | How the books treat it |
|---|---|
| Sales by category (dine-in, bar, takeout, delivery) | Separate revenue lines at full menu price |
| Comps, voids and discounts | Recorded with reason codes, never silently removed |
| Card tips collected | A liability, cleared through payroll or documented tip-outs |
| HST collected | A liability from the moment it is rung in, never revenue |
| Tender totals (cash, debit, credit) | Matched to processor deposits and the till count |
| Delivery platform orders | Gross sales, with platform fees as a separate expense |
Payroll for a roster that turns over
Hospitality payroll is a moving target: hires mid-month, split roles, servers who leave without notice. Inside the same engagement we handle source deductions, vacation and stat pay, ROEs issued promptly on every departure, and T4s that reconcile to the payroll ledger. Where the house controls tip distribution, those amounts flow through payroll with CPP and EI handled correctly; the controlled-versus-direct distinction is a filing question we treat properly on the tax side rather than leaving to a payroll default.
What the owner reads each month
Month-end lands the same way every time for the restaurants we work with across Mississauga and the GTA: revenue by channel, food cost by category, labour as a percentage of sales, and delivery margin after fees. Clean channel-level books are also what make the bigger questions answerable later, from a renovation to a second room, without a forensic rebuild first; when those questions arrive, the same numbers feed our Fractional CFO work. Fees are quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call, so the cost is known before any work starts.
